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Above all else, Liminoid/Lifeforms is a definitive statement. Baker clearly states his objective with the first few notes of “Liminoid Part I,” never wavering from his desire to capture the elements of classical and romantic composition with modern techniques. The result is an album that is warm; thick with texture and sonic craftsmanship. Albums with this much attention to detail often crumble under the weight of expectation but Baker has nothing to atone for once the final note of “Lifeforms” fades into the abyss.
The greatest accomplishment of Baker’s foray into the classical is in its simplicity. Much like the great masters of composition, Baker is never afraid to do too much by doing too little. Each of the four parts that comprise “Liminoid” joins seamlessly. Not until the soaring vocals of “Liminoid (Part IV)” can we begin to notice how Baker has carefully flirted with the grandiose by indulging it so completely. The subtle hints of cello and violin coupled with the restrained guitars and percussion are slow to reveal themselves as something more than Baker’s usual fare. “Liminoid (Part IV)” becomes the unveiling of Baker’s masterpiece; when the quiet decoration that has been painstakingly built for 22-minutes engulfs the classical philosophy in a fiery pillar of modern ingenuity. In spite of its ambitious nature, the whole of “Liminoid” does not falter for even a single note. This is proof that experimental music can be manipulated using the principles of Romanticism without compromising the chaos theory and fringe accessibility that has found deep roots in various genres.
After the breathtaking beauty of “Liminoid,” Baker risks toppling his opus with the sedentary drone of “Lifeforms.” Yet the risk is well worth it, providing the perfect counterpoint to elegance of “Liminoid” while also proving to be its mirror—albeit of the warped, funhouse variety. Where “Liminoid” was poised and polite, “Lifeforms” is a test of patience and will. It maintains the grace of its segmented lead-in but the restraint of “Liminoid” is replaced with rambunctiousness. “Lifeforms” isn’t abrasive but a piece built on dissonance and misplacement. Its parts, unlike “Liminoid,” are those of worn jigsaw puzzles; connections don’t fit as they should, the tabs are frayed beyond recognition, and there are holes from missing pieces. In this there is a majesty that admirers of “The Ugly Duckling” (and its ilk) will appreciate. “Lifeforms,” when held against “Liminoid,” will seem the tremorring visage; but as a mirror and a companion, it divulges the secrets of success found within “Liminoid,” while annihilating the measuring stick of beauty used for far too long.
The labeling of Liminoid/Lifeforms as a high form of art may be a bit of hyperbole but within Aidan Baker’s classical excursion, there are far too many gems of old and new to call it anything else. Over the course of one hour, Baker builds a sturdy bridge over a crevice that once relied on the likes of John Cage and Terry Riley as its architects. Old world beauty and futuristic tones can work as one, creating music that is as challenging as it is universal.
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The A side, titled "Wedding," opens with "Greek Catholic Stork Boy Choir of Ozerki Village," a rapid fire pulsing slab of cut up jittery notes. There’s obviously underlying musical elements there, but sped up, flanged, and covered in a digital noise sheen so as to not completely give up its source. The second piece, "Molomotki Ocarina Orchestra," keeps the same tone but locks it into a rhythmic loop that exhibits the smallest changes.
While the "Wedding" side was rapid, spastic and joyous; the "Funeral" side is appropriately slow and meditative. "School Girl Band of Gromovaya Balka" takes up the entire side B. It's a piece that uses the same type of source sounds as the A side but instead sequences them into a slow orchestral dirge. Here, knocking percussive elements, heavy sub-bass, and open, shimmery notes create an expansive drone.
The sound is one that’s a bit too harsh for the musique concrete crowd, yet not speaker-damaging enough for the noise kids. Thus, it exists in its own purgatory, waiting for listeners who are willing to step outside their comfort zone and embrace something different.
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Great ideas rarely spring from nowhere and the genesis of IBM 1401: A User's Manual is no exception. The lengthy evolution of this piece began in 2001 when Jóhannsson's father told him about the "funeral" that he and his IBM coworkers arranged for the 1401 when it was discontinued in 1971. While he was obviously deeply attached to the computer because he was the primary maintenance engineer for the project (the 1401 was first mass-produced, reasonably priced business computer), the connection between Jóhann's father and his work actually extended into much deeper territory. Like his son, Jóhann Gunnarsson was an ingenious and musically savvy fellow, and he managed to figure out a convoluted way to make his computer "sing." In fact, the 1401 sang its own elegy at the ceremony, a brief theme from an old Icelandic hymn. It is a 30 year old reel-to-reel recording of this improbably sad ceremony that provides the central melody of the album's opening piece as well as the cornerstone of the entire endeavor.
Shortly after beginning work the piece, Jóhannsson shared his father's story with a new acquaintance (choreographer Erna Ómarsdottir) whose father had also been an IBM employee. Together, they embarked upon a lengthy and enthusiastic exchange of literary and cinematic inspirations and philosophical and creative ideas that gradually cohered into a touring dance piece built around his father's tape. At the time, the modest accompanying music was written for a string quartet. However, when Jóhann began editing the score for release as an album, he realized that something new needed to be added to compensate for the now missing human/visual element provided by the dancers. Realizing that the heart of the work lay in the juxtaposition of human warmth and cold machinery, he expanded to a 60-piece orchestra to intensify the sweeping melancholy of the music. More importantly, he also added another section: the heartbreaking coda of "The Sun's Gone Dim and The Sky's Turned Black." It is this final section that completes IBM 1401: A User's Manual and elevates it toward the realm of great art (incidentally, the title is intentionally borrowed from another work of great art, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual).
Jóhannsson is somewhat unusual in the field of modern composition, as he incorporates avant-garde influences and embraces unconventional sounds, yet remains unwaveringly focused on the distinctly un-edgy idea of crafting simple and beautiful melodies. As such, he has much more in common with populist film score composers than the more cerebral, theory-based works of the current serious classical music scene. While that aesthetic certainly gives Jóhannsson’s work more immediate appeal than that of his peers, it is not without its perils. IBM 1401 is packed full of heavenly, swelling strings that would not at all be out of place in a cinematic adaptation of a Jane Austen novel but for the omnipresent old computer recordings that buzz, hum, and swoop in the background. Sometimes he hits the perfect balance; sometimes he becomes a bit too saccharine for my taste. This tendency may just have stemmed from being relatively new to working on such a scale, as it seems to have vanished completely by Fordlândia.
While it is quite pleasant on a purely musical level, IBM 1401 actually requires some thought and reflection from the listener to be fully appreciated. Taken solely on its musical content, for example, "Part Two: IBM 1403 Printer" can seem kind of boring, as it is largely built around a recording of Jóhannsson's dad dryly describing the proper maintenance of his machine. Obviously, a 30-year-old recording of his father holds more emotional power for Jóhann than it does for me, but when it is contextualized as a man describing the care of a beloved friend that is now long dead, it becomes imbued with a strong sense of loss and nostalgia.
Despite the strength and beauty of the album's arrangements, it is the non-orchestral elements of album's bookends that I find most striking. The four simple repeating notes of the computer's death song in the opening piece are sublime and bittersweetly evocative, while the digitized voice endlessly intoning a gender-switched variation of Dorothy Parker's "Two-Volume Novel" in the album's closer is absolutely devastating. The depth of heartbreak and longing that can be conveyed by a mournful robot voice lamenting "the sun's gone dim and the sky's turned black, cause I loved her and she didn't love back" is both wholly unexpected and wrenching (though Jóhannsson ultimately derails the piece into a somewhat cloyingly triumphant finale). IBM 1401 may sometimes tread a bit too close to mainstream film scores and might be too overly sentimental in places to herald as an unqualified triumph, but it certainly hits some very stunning highs and is the most moving tribute that a computer (or a father) could ever hope for.
Samples:
- Part One: IBM 1401 Processing Unit
- Part Three: IBM 1402 Card Read-Punch
- Part Five: The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black
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Gil Scott-Heron is perhaps best known for an astute analysis of US politics, race relations, and the role of the media. His voice personified hip intelligence and detached anger. The layers of detail and meaning in several of his songs have probably spawned PhD theses. Consequently, while most commentators were, for example, fawning over Ronald Reagan, some of us had Scott-Heron’s voice of alternate reason in our heads reminding us: “quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupe - cause all of a sudden we have fallen prey to selective amnesia - remembering what we want to remember and forgetting what we choose to forget. All of a sudden, the man who called for a blood bath on our college campuses is supposed to be Dudley 'God-damn' Do-Right?”
The death, this weekend, of former Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave me a timely reminder of the enduring power of those songs from the 1970s and early 1980s. Even if President Obama came to my house and spent a week reciting the words “a public servant who exemplified our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service” that would never erase Gil Scott-Heron’s indelible image of “Attila the Haig / running around frantically declaring himself in control and in charge / The ultimate realization of the inmates taking over at the asylum / The screenplay will be adapted from the book called Voodoo Economics by George 'Papa Doc' Bush. Music by the Village People, the very military 'Macho Man.'”
Back then, such wide-ranging multi-faceted critiques were given added credence by Scott-Heron’s ability and willingness to look unflinchingly upon his own milieu. In that respect his work compares with Sam Selvon’s nuanced descriptions of his fellow London-based Caribbean immigrants in The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending. By using insider knowledge, honesty, wit and irreverence both avoid applying any sentimental or romantic gloss to their subjects, and do so without being seen as a traitor. That same craft makes I’m New Here such a believable and modest self-portrait. The record is an incomplete jigsaw made up of oblique admissions, recollections, and acknowledgements; pieces of a puzzle of a man. And by turning his unflinching gaze upon himself, Scott-Heron has created an album as strong as any he has recorded.
Part of the success comes from the uber stripped-down sound which allows us to concentrate on the voice. On the title track, for example, a plucked acoustic guitar adds to the sense of isolation as the voice speaks alone and then breaks into song. Elsewhere, as producer Richard Russell mentions, programmed electronics are used in lieu of strings. One obvious sample apart, there seems to be less of a collage approach going on, and more a natural transmission of what might be termed “musical DNA” for an abstract merging of rural blues, spoken word, urban soul, and the rhythms of scratching, skipping and playground handclaps with a fractured (almost Burial-like) post-hip hop bass-heavy sound. The latter, of course, owing a good measure of its existence to the rhythms and poetry in Scott-Heron’s earlier work.
Just as the music is drawn from disparate decades, so snatches of lyrics and spoken interludes illuminate points in the artist’s life, with gratitude for a joyful early childhood and respect for the effort and sacrifice of others counter-balanced by flashes of personal flaws. At times, Scott-Heron’s voice sounds weathered and a little blurry, but often it booms with honesty and a craving to communicate. The tracks “Running” and “The Crutch” are perhaps the bleakest here, but no self-pity or preaching slows the flow. "Me and The Devil" is a thudding take on one of Robert Johnson's most quoted recordings. Although, this being GSH, first time he sings the line "You may bury my body, down by the highway side" he quickly adds "I don't really care where you bury me, once I'm gone."
So I’m New Here is not an alternate State of The Union update for those hungry to hear the ultimate dissection of W’s two terms, 9/11, Clinton, Hurricane Katrina or, say, the rise of media bigmouths and their moron retinue. There’s no evidence that Gil Scott-Heron spent his time in prison with a set of Bush Cards devising odes to a litany of religious loonies, feeble yes men and unrepentant pirates. We may never get to hear his thoughts about John Bolton, Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay, Colin Powell, Ahmed Chalabi, Condeleezza Rice, Jeb Bush, John Negroponte, Dick “Big Time” Cheney, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Robert Zoellick, Don Evans, Thomas White, Marc Racicot, Christie Todd Whitman, Ann Veneman, John “Crisco Oil” Ashcroft, Michael “FCC” Powell, Alberto Gonzales, Tom Scully, Paul “Wolfowitz of Arabia” Wolfowitz, William H. Haynes II, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert McCallum Jr., George W. Bush, Gale Norton, Elliot Abrams, Elaine Chao, Larry Lindsey, Stephen “Mini-Nukes” Cambone, George Tenet, Viet “Spin” Dihn, Richard “The Prince of Darkness” Perle, William G. Myers III, John D. Graham, Robert Mueller, Mitch “The Blade” Daniels, Andrew “Yoda” Marshall, Lt. General Jay Garner, Karen Hughes, Andrew Natsios, Mercer Reynolds, Spencer “S.U.V” Abraham, Andrew Card, Douglas J. Feith, J. Steven Griles, Richard Armitage, Vice Adm. Dr. John Poindexter, Tom “Duct Tape” Ridge, Ari Fleischer, Paul O’Neil, or John Snow. Indeed, at this point that is about as likely as a project about his father: who legend has it was the first black player to feature for Glasgow Celtic F.C.
This album runs for only about half an hour but the beautiful combination of intellect, humility, sincerity and soul left me feeling reborn rather than short-changed. I’m New Here shows the benefit of being confident enough to use clarity and simplicity when writing and recording. It also demonstrates the value of saying what you have to say and then shutting up. We hear what now seems to be most important for Gil Scott-Heron: coming to terms with his mortality, with his life and the people who have helped shape him. In the process, he gives us a glimpse of the woman who raised him, a figure as vivid as any he has depicted in song or verse. I’m stunned by the pain, hope, and the love and enduring self-belief in these grooves. Thank God he’s recording again. As he says: “I’m the closest thing I have to a voice of reason.”
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It is telling that “Tasty Fish” was recorded and released on Factory in the heady days before its fall and that the rest of the album was assembled during its decline and death. It’s an infectiously fun, exuberant, and hooky pop gem from top to bottom and even features the characteristically inscrutable Factory sense of humor, taking its title from a fish and chip shop. Notably (but not surprisingly), its release spawned several dance mixes, landed Stephen and Gillian on the covers of some big music magazines, and was simultaneously hailed as the “single of the week” in both NME and Melody Maker. Given that the rest of the album was written and recorded amidst panicked meetings about the fate of Factory and The Hacienda and the stressful birth of New Order’s Republic, it is easy to see why that sparkling, wide-eyed vitality noticeably dissipated. Much of The Other Two and You seems palpably half-hearted.
That said, The Other Two and You is not a sloppy or inept album—it is merely a non-descript, formulaic, and toothless one. Everything sounds like it is in the right place and there are generally no obvious flaws, except for perhaps the lyrics (it is probably for the best that Ian Curtis did not live to see his former drummer write songs containing lines like “love is the greatest thing and there’s nothing else to live for”). There aren’t any painfully insipid lyrics in “Tasty Fish,” but that is probably because Jeremy Kerr from A Certain Ratio contributed them. The other problems with this album are a bit more nebulous: the songs have hooks (but they’re not hooky enough), Gillian’s vocals are pleasant (but not particularly charismatic), and the songs are energetic (but one-dimensional and instantly dated). Interestingly, the duo nearly landed Kim Wilde as their vocalist, which might have made quite a bit of difference in the fortunes of everyone involved.
Much like its vastly superior successor, The Other Two and You is front-loaded with the poppiest material (including the second single “Selfish” and the aborted single “Moving On”). However, unlike Super Highways, the remainder does not become more substantial and likeable—it just becomes more thumping and clubby. There is no hint of darkness or depth here at all, just frothy, featherweight pop. The six remixes included here are perhaps a bit stronger than the original material, but they are still for the most part pretty generic. As expected, “Tasty Fish” still sounds pretty great when remixed, but I was pretty surprised that Moby managed to turn “Moving On” into a somewhat better track by adding a slinky, propulsive bass line and downplaying the vocals. It is quite damning when Moby remixes a song and makes it more soulful than the original. Categorically, The Other Two and You is a lackluster and disappointing album. Anyone interested in O2 would be much better served by checking out Super Highways instead.
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On his third full-length release Soriah is joined by the ever prolific Ashkelon Sain, memorable from his many years heading Trance to the Sun. Sain’s fondness for oversaturated hallucinatory soundscapes and drizzly shoegaze guitar is perfectly complimented by Soriah’s multi-timbred throat singing. While certainly not imitators, comparisons to Dead Can Dance would not be inappropriate. Both groups paint their psychoacoustic masterpieces from a similar palette using voice, tribal percussion, keyboards and stringed instruments from around the world. Furthermore Soriah’s ability to hold multiple pitches simultaneously adds new depth and freshness to a musical formula already tried and true. Singing in the ancient Aztec language of Nahuatl his voice is resonant with a beauty that pays homage to his ancestral homeland of Mexico. All of these factors blend together quite naturally and make for a unique listening experience.
The pacing of the 11 songs on this disc is perfect. I feel like a drunken sailor on a boat drifting amongst starry archipelagos when I listen. Lulled into a benevolent somnolence I gently rise and fall with waves of sound that continuously crash and crest. The first song, “Yoallicuicatl,” establishes the general mood with thickly bowed strings buzzing a sonorous melody over the top of an undulating keyboard. It serves to create a sacred listening space by cleansing any obstructive energy left lingering from previous stereo sessions. The second track kicks off with the bells and hand drums that are present throughout the disc in various rhythmic combinations. The meditative percussion forms a backbone of sonic entrainment that Soriah weaves his vocal sorcery around. Deeply emotive, his voice lets out long wavering cries and deep bellows that are both transcendent and ominous. I would be curious to know what his lyrics translate into, but without that knowledge I am free to listen more closely to the subtleties within his often multi-tracked voice.
“Morguul” is exemplary of the albums overall ekstasis. The percussion reminds me of a hard spring rain pattering on a rooftop, while Soriah’s voice rings and vibrates in long ululating drones. The violin adds bright touches of gaiety and fills me with optimism. “Borbak” however is darker, earthy and chthonic. A high pitched insect like whistle whirrs and murmurs in the background, slightly rising and falling, mimicking within the microstructure of the song what the album does a whole. The closing “Amo Cahuit” is similarly foreboding. With crunchy strains of distorted guitar echoing as if out of a cave, a sibilant hiss that howls like the wind, and a menacing swell of deep bass amidst the softly tinkling bells it easily raises the hairs on the back of my neck. Soriah and Sain show high caliber and precision in their artistry and Atlan, full of grace and nuance, will be a keynote in my ever evolving musical rotation for quite some time.
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It is difficult to acknowledge S U R V I V E’s new album without touching on the hype surrounding it. Half of the Austin band, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, are responsible for the soundtrack to Stranger Things, which has received significant attention. But the fact of the matter is that the band (also featuring Adam Jones of Troller and Mark Donica) has been composing synth heavy film score work for years now, and while they are completely deserving of the attention their work is now receiving, RR7349 would be just as amazing of a record without the hype surrounding their extracurricular activities.
Since 2010 the quartet has been working on their analog synth soundscapes, albums that weave these vintage sounds into bleak and at time frightening moods.Of course, parallels with John Carpenter’s soundtrack work are inevitable, and while I have no doubt he is an influence, their work is distinctly their own.While they are intentionally using vintage gear, the production technique is distinctly contemporary.Rather than trying to copy a sound from 30 years ago, they use that to create something fresh and modern.
Alongside the production, much also has to be said for the songwriting and composition.Unlike entire genres that have been built upon a foundation of replicating 1980s neon aesthetics and damaged VHS tape visuals, composition is the focus, rather than repetitive hardware demos.This is immediately evident on album opener "A.H.B."What begins as a simple drum machine and bassline structure, propelled by an intentionally simplistic synth lead, soon becomes a constantly evolving and developing work, shifting layers and patterns rapidly but never losing consistency.There are definite film score similarities to be heard here, but the work itself is too dynamic to be just a background piece.
While there is a lot of variation between songs on RR7349, the mood stays a consistent dark and sinister one.The slow shuffle of "Dirt" is all big crashing drum machine and pulsating synth arpeggios, with complex melodies weaved throughout that become the focus by the end."High Rise" features not only a great bit of drum machine programming, but also a diverse bass sequencer driving it to a sound that could almost be vintage Front 242 at their most atmospheric.
The album is not all percolating keyboards and crunching drum machine, however.The surging synth strings of "Other" cut through an intentionally uncomfortable amount of space, resulting in an atmospheric, slightly menacing piece of unsettling music."Low Fog" is a perfectly titled piece, with its opaque miasma of buzzing electronics and beat-less soundscape.The mood is uncomfortable and gives the sense that something horrible is about to happen at any time, made all the more intense with its extremely slow fade out.
Closing on "Cutthroat," a complex, rhythmic mass of crashing rhythms and big, boisterous leads is also a brilliant stroke, ending the album with an appropriate culminating climax of all the elements that made it so great.S U R V I V E may be current media darlings due to their other work, but RR7349 is a further refinement of the sound honed on their last self-titled full length.It may have the mood in place, but there is simply too much going on for this album to be considered soundtrack music, because it would easily upstage any visual component it may be paired with.It truly is an audio-only cinematic experience, and one that is gripping until the very last moments.
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Multimedia artist Steve Roden has stated that his work often begins with the product of some other artist, and becomes a jumping off point for him to create his own inspired work. "Distance Piece," the audio component of Striations presented here, was part of a larger body of work inspired by an unfinished sculpture by his grandmother. The audio portion that makes up this disc may lose a bit in the translation from its overall conceptual framework, but still makes for a strong work on its own.
"Distance Piece" itself is a 46 minute composition that was made to accompany the six minute film Striations, and played outside of the Sculpture Center in New York, where the film was screened on a loop inside.By design, the audio portion was intentionally divorced from its visual component, but is intrinsically linked at its overall composition, however.The audio is culled from treated field recordings that were collected when Roden and artist Mary Simpson were filming, capturing cars and birds in the distance, speaking, tapping rocks, bowing cymbals, etc.
These recordings were then treated and processed by Roden into expansive rich, resonating tones.There remains a constant low-level hum throughout, so that even when the mix becomes extremely open and superficially sparse, it never transitions fully to silence.The elongated tones and heavy panning effects make it unclear where the sounds were initially sourced from, though the occasional hint of human voice or chirping bird occasionally slips through to stand out.
The entirety of the piece is underscored by a passage of electric guitar, playing a note progression created from a passage of text by sculptor Henry Moore that Roden's grandmother kept around as an inspiration.For the most part this too appears largely in its original form, a cold passage of tonally pure notes that underscore the more abstract passages, weaving through the less obvious sounds surprisingly clearly.
While the piece has its strengths, at times "Distance Piece" simply fades off into the distance.Given that it was originally part of a larger multimedia piece, and intended for incidental listening to viewers walking to, from, and around where the film was being screened, it suffers from being the sole focus of attention.It is never a badly executed work by any means, it just simply becomes stagnant and seemingly unchanging at times, which can be a flaw in this sort of electro-acoustic work.
I hope my criticism of Roden's work does not come across as too harsh, because by no means is Striations a bad piece of music.At times it is simply too subtle for its own good, and by being presented as a single album-length work, my attention tended to wander here and there throughout.Fans of his previous work, and adherents to this minimalist brand of experimental work will easily find much to enjoy here, it just does not manage to transcend far beyond the genre’s adherents.
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The enigmatic Fossil Aerosol Mining Project have somehow managed to retain their anonymity in the eight years since the project was reactivated. With this, their consistency in presenting long lost audio recordings (or excellent forgeries of them) in a new and reconstructed context has not waned in the slightest, and this second release this year (the other being digital-only) keeps that mystery alive and fascinating.
Afterdays Media/Helen Scarsdale Agency
Revisionist History is actually a two-plus hour work, consisting of the full length CD and an additional nine pieces (Revisionist History Volume 2) downloadable with an included code.The material on the physical portion of the release is comprised of new compositions that utilize previous work from the group’s expansive past as a source material, while the downloadable portion is more explicitly based in revisiting and reworking older compositions.
Because of that the CD based material has the more fleshed out and diverse sound to it when comparing the two.The FAMP sound is in full effect, however:layers of decaying audio tape mixed with bizarre studio treatments and processing.In many of these cases though, the band(?) straddles that line between noise and music extremely well.A piece such as "Napthol Impermanence" is an example of this:shimmering sounds and what may be an actual synthesizer underscoring the more dissonant moments well.There are simple melodies also to be heard within the clattering noises and field recordings of "Filtered By Limestone" as well.
At other points on the album what sounds like existing music is used as a source, destroyed and manipulated into oblivion.What best sounds like ancient recordings of strings and music boxes lurk below the surface of "Vestigial Sideband", but seemingly rotting below layers of organic static and warm crackles of decay.A similar sense appears on "Mistranslated Practices", as expansive electronic passages lay beneath crunchy loops and disorientating production, with fragments of radio communication adding to the confusion.On "Squatters at the Launch Facility", FAMP uses the piece’s nearly 16 minute duration well, first blending voices and field recordings with rhythmic loops, building complexity and variation.It has a cyclic structure to it, but the layers pile up atop each other wonderfully to just disintegrate at the conclusion.
The downloadable portion supposedly consists of previous works revisited (of which I have not heard the originals of), but it could just as easily be entirely new material.The sound is consistent with the physical portion, capturing an array of textures, found recordings, and rotting magnetic tape and reshaping them into complex collages that bear little resemblance to how they began.It seems as if the treatments of this older material were more restrained, however, and so the sound lacks a bit of the complexity of the newer material.This would make sense if the group is reworking material dating back to the mid 1980s, however.
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's sound is one that has been well established in their recent spate of releases, and Revisionist History is another strong entry.The music is murky, weird, and at times uncomfortable, which is exactly what the mysterious group intends I suppose.As it stands, it is a wonderful collage of crackling textures, mutated tones, and a motivation to decode the sounds as much as possible, though I have had little success doing that myself.
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I cannot pretend to keep up with Andrew Liles' overwhelmingly voluminous solo output, but I pounced on this album, as it seemed significant that the generally dormant United Dairies label had reawakened to bestow its imprimatur upon this opus.  Happily, my instincts proved to be unerring (as usual).  United Dairies is the perfect home for an album as aberrant as this one: while Steven Stapleton has described it as "a masterpiece of modern contemporary composition" and Liles ostensibly drew his inspiration from the '50s and '60s avant-garde, The Power Elite more accurately sounds like a prolonged nightmare taking place inside the rusted machinery of a clock tower.  This is easily one of the year's strangest and most adventurous albums.
Although its musical inspirations look reverently backwards, the conceptual inspirations behind The Power Elite are grimly contemporary, abstractly conveying "the impotence of the masses living in the shadow of military, economic and political institutions."  Much like a Merzbow album, however, that conceptual inspiration does not manifest itself all that obviously in the actual music (other than making it clear that this album is dark for a reason).  Still, it is nice to know that NWW are united in their opinions on the state of the world (Dark Fat was dedicated to "psychopathic scumbag individuals, regimes and corporate filth").  For the most part, The Power Elite just sounds hallucinatory and hellish, though whether it represents the living nightmare of the masses or the imagined Boschian future hell of the damned architects of our current state is anybody's guess (perhaps both?). There is a smattering of earthbound touches like distant church bells throughout the album, but the warped and pitch-shifted voices of "Artificially Induced Consciousness" definitely lie the otherworldly place between "bovine" and "demonic."  Incidentally, "Artificially Induced Consciousness" is one of the most impressive and fully realized pieces on the album, beautifully weaving a queasily dissonant reverie that sounds like an infernal barnyard full of out-of-tune, fitfully operational music boxes.
While a few of the other pieces are distinguished by the aforementioned voices or bells, the overall aesthetic of The Power Elite seems to be one of overlapping plinking and pointillist strings and discordant strums.  It sounds like Liles' arsenal consisted primarily of music boxes and rusty, out-of-tune harps, but he could have been plucking at the guts of a heavily modified piano as well.  In any case, the overall effect is quite a disorienting one of rippling, layered dissonance occasionally embellished by unintelligible voices or distantly chiming bells.  The only real classical avant-garde reference point that I can think of is Morton Feldman, as all of the pieces here bleed together to create a sustained and simmering uneasiness.  Unexpectedly, however, there are few departures from that aesthetic near the end of the album.  The first is "Affluenza," which seems to employ bowed strings to achieve something almost melodic, though the primary emphasis is still upon texture and harmonic overtones.  Much more dramatic is the following "The Iron Law of the Oligarchy," which collages layers of sampled operatic sopranos with a dissonant piano performance and something that sounds like someone having a laser battle in a pigpen while strangling a balloon animal.  It is probably safe to say that I will not use that description for any other albums this year.  Near the beginning of the album, "Horatio Alger Myth" is also a bit of curveball, converging into a sickly assemblage of woodwinds and brass for a very wrong-sounding fanfare.
If The Power Elite has any real shortcoming, it is merely that only "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" strongly stands out as an individual piece.  In the wrong light, it might seem like Liles is endlessly recycling the same ideas for the majority of the album, but it seems like a conscious and sound aesthetic decision from where I am sitting.  If the album lacks in distinct peaks, it more than makes up for it with its masterfully sustained mood and seamlessly flowing arc.  Also, for a symphony of utter wrongness, The Power Elite is surprisingly listenable, as it never feels particularly jarring or heavy-handed at all.  While it is definitely uneasy listening in the extreme, I cannot say that I have ever heard anything else quite like it, which makes it a bit of a minor masterpiece and very likely to be the strongest release to come from the NWW camp this year.
 
 
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- Albums and Singles
Birmingham’s Pram are the rare band that can cause me to simultaneously think conflicting thoughts like "it is absolutely criminal that this band was never as big as Stereolab" and "it is abundantly clear why this band never quite managed to transcend cult status."  In any case, they were unquestionably one of the more idiosyncratic, inspired, and polarizing bands of the '90s, though they finally managed to achieve some widespread success in the early 2000s.  In fact, Helium was recently hailed by FACT as one of the greatest post-rock albums of all-time, while an article on The Quietus proposed The Stars Are So Big as the best album of the '90s.  Appropriately, those first two Pram albums (originally released on Too Pure) have now gotten well-deserved vinyl reissues from Medical Records.  At the risk of sounding reductionist, both of these albums fall into Pram's Krautrock-influenced phase, preceding their (also reductionist) aesthetic swing into more exotica-influenced territory.  Describing Pram as "Krautrock-influenced" does not even remotely begin to capture how bizarre, artfully deranged, and fun some of these songs are though.
The Stars Are So Big… (1993) was Pram's debut album, released shortly after a pair of earlier EPs (one of which, the self-released Gash, was engineered by hometown compatriot Justin Broadrick).  While it is convenient and somewhat accurate to lump the band’s sound at this time together with Stereolab, the presence of vocalist Rosie Cuckston ensured that Pram were very much a singular identity.  Cuckston is a bit of a double-edged sword though, as she is revered by fans and absolutely integral to Pram's fundamental otherness, but she is a bit of an acquired taste for the unconverted.  While her vocals are generally described as "childlike," it actually feels more like the band just invited their terminally shy friend up on stage to sing for the first time...or maybe she just sounds like someone in a trance.  It is hard to say which is more accurate, but her vocal style is definitely very much all her own.  
In some respects, that is a bit problematic, as Rosie's distracted-sounding, quavering, and not entirely on-key vocals necessarily become the primary focus of every song, regardless of how interesting and inventive the underlying music can be.  In other respects, Cuckston is a crucially eerie, iconoclastic, and defining presence, though the rest of the band is hardly conventional (their original line-up was based solely upon vocals and theremin, for example).  Therein lies the central paradox and complexity of Pram: their most obviously inaccessible feature is also one of the most essential and beloved aspects of their aesthetic.  I am personally still a bit on the fence regarding Cuckston's vocals, but I am gradually coming around, as she is a one-of-a-kind songwriter.  Cuckston aside, the other huge difference between Stereolab and Pram is that they assimilated the same influences in very different ways: Stereolab did it sauvely, while Pram turned out like a messy, precarious, and freewheeling circus.
From a pop music perspective, "Radio Freak in a Storm" is the definite high point of the album, boasting a wonderfully plinking arpeggio hook, a cool keyboard melody, and a pleasantly swaying groove.  Pram clearly were not too worried about trying to write catchy singles though, as the song frequently derails into dissonant interludes of gnarled strings.  Elsewhere, "The Ray" is quite an unusual and noteworthy piece, as the backing music is just a sparse keyboard melody and some howling noise.  As far as I am concerned, however, the real zenith of The Stars Are So Big is unquestionably the gorgeous 16-minute epic "In Dreams You Too Can Fly."  In fact, it may very well be the crown jewel of Pram's entire career.  While Cuckston eventually starts singing near the end, the piece is primarily an instrumental and it captures the band at the absolute height of their powers.  I have absolutely no idea who is playing what instrument, but the roiling guitar maintains a smoldering tension worthy of Sonic Youth and the rhythm section keeps the momentum building wonderfully as an extended and surprisingly great trumpet solo unfolds.  In short, it captures the entire band performing at their absolute best without the distraction of trying to shape themselves into an accessible song-like shape.  It is a truly wonderful piece of music.  The remainder of these eight songs certainly all have their nice touches too, but "In Dreams You Too Can Fly" is the real reason to hear this album. For the most part, Pram got noticeably better with their next release.
On that note, the following "Dancing on a Star" is even better, veering off into quite a bit of spaced-out abstraction while still managing to stay grounded with a wonderfully rolling and stumbling groove.  In fact, I can think of few other bands that ever managed to get quite as crazy and outré as Pram do here while still managing to loosely adhere to something resembling conventional song-like structures.  "Nightwatch" is even more bonkers, as it sounds like there is simultaneously someone banging on kitchen utensils; a very serious violinist trying to hold the song together; a wobbly, weirdly bass-heavy theremin; a lazily melodic one-finger keyboard melody; and a gnarled eruption of guitar feedback all happening at once.  The overall effect is like looking into a snow globe that portrays a spirited talent show in a psych ward.  I think that statement effectively summarizes early Pram in general, actually: I cannot stress enough how improbably far out Pram managed to go while still masquerading as a pop/rock band.  I doubt it was completely intentional, but the contrast between Cuckston's vocals and the band's music was a stroke of genius.  Having a seemingly guileless and starry-eyed poet as a front person is the perfect distracting cover for a band endlessly hellbent on conjuring up such a perverse, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink cacophony.
As bizarre as things gets, it is generally the rhythm section that makes Helium work so well, as even the slightest content is bolstered by an unrelenting momentum.  Cuckston’s lyrics aside, there is not much at all to "Things Left on the Pavement" other than a solid bass line and some very spirited drumming.  Nevertheless, that proves to be more than enough to carry the song (though it helps that it eventually erupts into a wild interlude of yelping, jungle-like noises).  Though the band can sound quite mannered on record at times, it is easy to see how such unpredictable frenzies of chaos made Pram a somewhat legendary live act.  Interestingly, however, it is one of the more straightforward and Cuckston-centric pieces that steals the show: the lilting and melancholy "My Father the Clown."  While there is predictably a complete collapse into abstract lunacy near the end, the appeal is solely that it is absolutely perfect song with an absolutely perfect melody.
Sadly, "Clown" does not sustain its greatness for its entire duration due to Pram's genius for self-sabotage, but it still hits the highest highs of anything on the album.  That is quite an achievement, as Helium is positively riddled with fine moments.  While the depth and poignancy of "Clown" is a bit of an aberration, it is pieces like the rollicking "Blue" and "Dancing on a Star" that most effectively embody Helium's spirit, which is one of infectiously unhinged fun and cheerfully wonky experimentation.  Recognizing Helium as a crucial post-rock album is great, but that fails to convey how truly bizarre and uncategorizable it actually is.  "Post-rock" is only a vaguely plausible label here because there is not currently a "weird, carnival-esque, and introverted party album" genre.  In a perfect world, Helium would have birthed it, but it would have been a damn hard act for anyone else to follow.
 
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